Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box, from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done? Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain, like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists, and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with your conscience!" He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within himself to build upon?" Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_ actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.